Adventures of a Quantum Cowboy

Ok, photos are underway I promise.  Right now I’m blasting a new Black Keys album and trying to get through some of the engagement photos I did for Matt and Dena last week.  I guess Liz showed her wedding shots to them and they liked what they saw!  We did a shoot down in Santa Monica, on the pier and on the beach, both digital and Kodak Portra 160vC.  Got some keepers.  The agreement I have with them includes license, so I will be blogging on some and posting some to my public wedding portfolio on the gallery.

Oh yeah, and I guess Liz’s brother is asking me how much I’d charge for a wedding gig in Redding… going to have to take a good hard look at my calendar and bust out the spreadsheet for that one.

EXCELLENT photo day at The Getty last month, and just got back from AZ with some shots from the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix.  It’s moving slowly… between work, school, and theatre I’m getting my butt kicked pretty good, but photography is my zen so I’m not giving it up entirely!

The Gallery is undergoing a massive overhaul.  It was getting difficult to set pricing and sizing with the photos not sorted by format.  You can’t do some of the same things with a scan of a print from 35mm film that you can with a 10.1 MP digital image (at least, not with my quality of scanner).  The difference was manageable, until I just bought a Diana F+ 120 / Medium Format (more on this later).  The square aspect ratio and different negative size make it almost impossible to have the same print offerings.  So, under each format category there are subcategories by subject, which should still be amenable to finding what you are looking for… comments and feedback welcome.

I’ve added a category for greeting cards, which I will begin working on soon.  Enough people have asked me if I turn my photos into cards that I think I should probably get around to it.  If you have specific ones that you would like cards made for, please just send me an email or comment here on your favorites.

I’m finally getting to a huge backlog of unprocessed photos.  Some new ones have already been uploaded to the gallery, more to come!  I guess I should probably blog about them too at some point… sheesh, how do all my amateur hobbies turn into hard work and grand schemes?  /eyeroll.

As an aside, if you aren’t already, you can follow me on Twitter if you want.  It’s not particularly photography-related, but it might be… sometimes…

Hope everyone is well!

Dawn at Beale's Point, on Folsom Lake in northern California.

I’m definitely a morning person.  Mornings are awakenings, new beginnings, a clean slate of possibility.  The nostalgia of sunset and the thrill of the night have their appeal; but the still silence of morning carries a certain clarity of being that other times of day lack.  Mornings are pure.

Those of you who know me will agree that I seldom stop moving; I am always on the go, and generally if my schedule isn’t at least slightly overbooked, I’m bored.  But morning photography without conversation, absorbing the new day with observation and without comment, is my zen, my one place of quiet that I reserve for myself every now and then.

Near my parents’ house in El Dorado Hills, CA is Lake Natoma.  Some months ago, I took the XT and my tripod out there.  I always underestimate how cold the pre-dawn darkness can be nearly everywhere (though it is especially acute in dry climates, be warned).  Fortunately I had some thin gloves, but it never seems like I can manipulate the camera controls accurately or fast enough.

Still reflections in the morning light at Lake Natoma.

A sturdy tripod is essential to good morning photography.  Even still hands and image stablized lenses can’t cancel the blur from the long exposures necessary to get the ethereal effect from not-quite-still water.  And you’d be surprised at the often surreal look of a a night time shot that has been “soaked” for a long exposure in the low ambient light.

Winds are typically calm or non-existent inland, though near large enough bodies of water this is not often true.  When you can get still water in the mornings, look for the multitude of reflection shots you can get in anything, from little pools, to puddles, to lakes or the ocean.  In the shot at right, the water is so still adn the reflection so clear that it would be difficult to tell whether or not the image were upside-down.  That shot taken with as wide an aperture as I could get to offset the twig in the foreground, and a relatively fast shutter speed for this time of day (1/10) to give the focus point a crispness through which I tried to convey how mornings make me feel… and this shot comes pretty close.

In the half light of just before dawn is one of the best opportunities for bird shots as well.  Most birds, especially those who feed in or near water, are going to be early risers for breakfast.  I’ve got a few photos in the queue to be processed of birds in the morning… as usual, I’ll get to it “eventually.”  In the meanwhile, may I recommend sampling some of the zen a weekend early morning gives you!

Birds, a bench, and a bum near the Santa Monica pier.

The most recent addition to my photographic arsenal is the Blackberry Pearl 8130 smartphone.  Obviously it lacks anything close to power and creative flexibility of my SLRs, but it *is* notably portable and generally always on me, something I can’t say about my significantly less easily portable SLRs.

You can read the full CNET review of the phone if you’d like, but the essentials are that it’s a 2 MP camera with 5x zoom and a small flash unit that allows for limited user control of white balance, quality setting, and color effect.

My general impression is that it’s a fairly decent camera for what it’s designed to do… that is to say: spontaneous shots meant to document or for odd creativity.  The low resolution means large scenes tend to get this sort of smeared effect, which can be kind of cool.  For example in the photo at left, slight overexposure of the background has grayed out the sky, and this combined with the los-res smearing and the ’sepia’ effect, the image is given a very apocalyptic feel.  Detail on any one part of the image is quite low, but the overall impression is actually strongly delivered in my opinion.  While it runs counter to my usual style of trying to capture detail, I must concede that this could be a source of new experimentation for me.

Extreme contrast test, walking from Santa Monica Pier to Venice Beach early evening.

Color fidelity is in general quite poor, and I think most of the color ones I have taken could do with a bit of sat boost.  However, I should point out that I have until now only tried the camera out in situations for which I have already admitted that the device is not designed - large scenes with a moderate to large amount of detail.  This is what I usually like to take when doing city and street shots, so I’m not really surprised that this is the bulk of what I have.  Sometime in the near future, I would like to try usign the Blackberry camera on photographs where there is a single point of focus, one which is quite close up and filling the frame.  I suspect that these will turn out much better and more interesting.

Good photography depends only partially on equipment.  Cheap and low-key stuff can turn out good photographs, you just need to bear in mind the different aspects of what you are using.  Apparent shortcomings can be turned into very creative advantages in the right hands.  Sure, if you want to do a particular kind of photography, you may need special equipment; you won’t get very far trying to photograph birds without a decent telephoto, for example.  But good composition and creativity are qualities that are completely independent of equipment.  The important thing for a photographer to remember is that, regardless of your equipment, don’t fight what you’ve got; see where the natural intersection is between the equipment you have and where you are, and go for it!

Ok, wow.  I don’t know if I still remember how to use WordPress, its been so long!  Anyway, so the new house is finally starting to look mostly the way I want it to, but there is quite a bit of work to do yet (I’m sure it never ends).  I haven’t quite gotten my photography lair set up yet, but at least the machine is operational.  Turned out that the copy of WinXP I had on there was not legit, so the activation period timed out while it was mothballed… I fire the thing up to find that Windows has locked me out.  So I ordered a new legit copy of WinXP Home off of eBay, installed the new OS, and xferred all my photos over from the backup drive.  Ugh.  I wish I could just pony up the cash for a nice Mac system for photography, but the funds just aren’t forthcoming these days.

Anyway, I’m up in Sacramento with the family for the holidays, and today is a nice quiet day at home… good thing I brought my entire drive up!  I’ll be combing through and posting today.  Hopefully multiple times, but we’ll see.

I hope everyone had / is having a great winter holiday, and that you and your families are well.  And please forgive me (again) for yet another long bout of not attending to my photography.

Just got internet at at MY new house!  w00t!  However, there’s been (and remains) a ton of work to do, as you may well imagine.  On top of that, the photography machine is still mothballed as I don’t have a desk to set it up on yet…. one more thing on the list.  Posts will likely be sparse for awhile yet.

Entrance to the Public Vaults, where there are many interactive displays.

…in fact I really enjoyed myself. The goal was initially to hit the National Museum of American History, but unfortunately that was closed for renovation until “Fall 2008″. Oh well… maybe next time. I walked down the mall, past the National Museum of Natural History (thought about ducking in there too), through some lovely gardens (separate post pending) and saw the Archives across the way. Envisioning miles of dusty boxes guarded by marines (or perhaps that secret government warehouse in Indiana Jones), I at first shrugged it off as a possible tourist destination. I was strolling past it with my eye on a coffee shop down the way when a sign caught my eye.

“Discover your National Archives Experience!”

To which I responded (in my head of course), “quoi?“.  Enlightened by the sign to the fact that the Archives do indeed welcome visitors, I proceeded to the public entrance, and entered… I was extremely impressed.

After the usual monument rigamarole of the security screen, visitors are provided with several locations within the National Archives and Records Adminstration to explore.  The most visited is the Rotunda, a cathedral-like chamber housing the original copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.  With majestic carpeting and towering paintings that depict the founding fathers adorning the sides of the domed room, the Rotunda lends itself very easily to projecting a state of awe.

The Constitution of the United States, on display at the Archives.

In the gallery area, there are many interactive displays about various events in U.S. history, grouped by themes found in the Constitution (”provide for the common defense,” etc).  I explored many displays on the revolution, the civil war, civil rights, watergate… actually quite exciting for a history buff!

There is also a film theater underground that plays various videos on U.S. history and democracy, and a gift shop.  I picked up copies of “Jefferson’s Bible”, and “Von Braun,” the latter a biography about the brilliant German-turned-American rocket engineer who help architect the U.S. space program.

All in all, a thoroughly fascinating visit… highly recommended for any history buff, or anyone with an interest in exploring the key documents that make up our country’s past.

The photography machine is still mothballed while I wait on my new house to close… hopefully by Monday that will go through!   I will remain a busy time though, with everything to take care of at the new place.

However, I do have some photos to post!  I’m in DC right now for the NASA 50th Anniversary Celebration, which was last night… happy birthday, NASA!  While I’m out here I’ve been doing some exploration of the city, as I haven’t been here since I was a little kid, and I really don’t remember much.

Funny story: so I get off the metro at the Smithsonian station, right near the national mall, I confidently mount my short lens, and prepare to take a gorgeous morning shot of the Washington Monument… and freeze, staring in disbelief at the LCD screen.  “NO CF CARD.” And I say to myself, “you have got to be f-ing kidding me….” But alas, yes, it’s true, I left home with all of my camera equipment except the memory cards. DOH! Fortunately I was able to buy some from the Air and Space Museum gift shop, but talk about fleecing… $32 each for 256MB flash cards!!! Ugh. So I bought two and I’m shooting on “medium fine” for this trip… I’m an idiot.

Fiascos with mem cards aside, I hope you enjoy the shots from the nation’s capitol.

Sorry, photos still delayed… I have to move out of this house by the 15th, so its a hectic time of packing and moving boxes.  Not to mention all the paperwork etc for the new house!  Will get to some photography soon I hope.

Wow!  What a great weekend.  I’m just wrapping up a trip out to Lake Tahoe with the fam and a whole bunch of family friends.  One the families we;ve known basically forever happens to own a time-share condo right near the water, and they graciously invited us out for the long weekend.  Notable outcomes: ended up $25 down when I left the tables at Harrahs, my doctor-ordered “low-cholesterol and high-excercise” lifestyle was totally obliterated over the course of the last three days, and… got some early morning dawn shots of the lake and waterfowl.

Another bit of interesting news is the fact that my workplace is switching over to the 9/80 schedule.  The 4-nine-hour days, 1-eight-hour Friday, 4-nine-hour days, 1 Friday off schedule should give me two long weekends a month to get some more travel and photography in… sweet!  I totally can’t wait.

Life has been busy with the preparations for the move (did I mention I bought a house?) and work overload as usual, but rest assured there are plenty of photos in-process for eventual posting.  Check back soon!  I hope everyone had a safe and fun long weekend.